Obama's environmental policy–year one

Abstract

President Lyndon B Johnson once said, “Being President is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There is nothing to do except stand there and take it”. As 2009 comes to a close, it's a good time to reflect on the Obama Administration's first 10 months and how US environmental policy has been affected. Much has been said about how the euphoria of that balmy night in Chicago's Grant Park has been transformed into, as the New York Times put it, “the daily grind of governance”. Similarly, former Congressman Lee Hamilton recently observed: “I think he [Obama] has learned that governing is harder than campaigning, and I think he's learned it with a vengeance”. President Obama's environmental visions and agenda have, in some measure, simply been put on the back burner. Readers will recall that, during the 2008 campaign, then-Senator Obama included many environmental initiatives in his platform. If anything, that particular agenda has now become one among many. So…the scorecard: First, people. President Obama's appointment of Lisa Jackson as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator is seen by many in the environmental community as a vast improvement over her predecessor, Stephen Johnson. New initiatives on fuel efficiency and reduction of greenhouse gases have been credited to her. Likewise, the President's appointment of Nobel Laureate Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy demonstrated the Administration's devotion to “hard” science, with a pragmatic mix of renewable energy and energy-efficiency proposals. The choice of Carol Browner, a long-time environmental administrator, as “climate czar” was an important first step in organizing White House efforts on addressing global climate change. Second, notable bills. Encouragingly, the omnibus Public Lands Management Act added two million acres of wilderness and thousands of miles of rivers under government regulation. However, the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, has drawn attention to the lack of progress on the US climate bill, which would require carbon emission reductions of 20% from 2005 levels by 2020. The Senate Bill, sponsored by Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry, is already the subject of partisan debate, not to mention Democratic party defectors, and seems to be in for trouble. In November, the two Senators began private negotiations with Republicans and moderate Democrats on a possible compromise, making it unlikely that a bill will be up for a vote in 2009, and suggesting that the American delegates to the Copenhagen meeting will not deliver a solid mandate regarding carbon reductions. Third, green/renewable energy. At the outset, much of the economic stimulus money has been directed toward the development of new forms of renewable energy and the means to reduce US dependence on fossil fuels. President Obama included some noteworthy environmental legislation in his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, including $11 billion for an electric smart grid, $6.3 billion for state and local governments to invest in energy efficiency, and $6 billion for renewable energy. Likewise, the Department of Energy has been, in a word, “energetic”, awarding many millions of dollars in grants, guarantees, and contracts for renewable energy production and energy-conservation measures. Fourth, the nitty-gritty. Sometimes, precedent can be a difficult practice to alter. For example, while the Department of the Interior froze petroleum and gas drilling on 60 of the 77 national forest sites that the George W Bush Administration allowed in its 11th hour, the Department recently announced it will leave in place Bush-era changes to the stream-buffer rule – which was originally designed to protect streams from mountaintop-removal coal mining – until 2011. In August of this year, a federal judge rejected the Department's authority to change the rule without undertaking a full rulemaking process and inviting public comment. Meanwhile, environmental groups' hopes for quickly curbing mountain-top-removal mining shifted to the EPA, which regulates the practice through Clean Water Act permits. So far, the EPA has responded positively, freezing all 79 active applications for new mountaintop-removal mines and revoking a permit that the Bush Administration had issued in 2007. But all is not perfect. The Obama Administration, after much soul-searching, allowed oil drilling in the Beaufort Sea and timber sales in the Tongass Forest. So it goes; you win some and you lose some – eventually, the hailstorm will ease somewhat.